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Thursday, March 7, 2013

Haiku Deck for Easy Presentation Creation on the iPad

Think of Haiku Deck as a simplified PowerPoint creator for the iPad. When we first found Haiku Deck we loved the focus on the image and that it required no sign up for the students, they could just create. Teaching students the importance of "less is more" in a presentation is sometimes something we forget to emphasize. We've all sat through a presentation being read to us off of slides at some point, and thus comes the term - death by PowerPoint.

With this week's update of the app still gives the free limited font and layout choice and an improved in app library of great photos based on the words used on the slides or terms searched for. If using the in app library, it will cite the source of the photos automatically in the presentation. With the newest update you can also crop and manipulate your photos from your library.

Other updated features include bulleted and numbered lists, as well as charts and graphs that are fully editable in the app by clicking and dragging. I like the new features and the fact that it remains simple!

Like many of the apps that we share in our trainings, workflow for a teacher is always important. Using apps that have a corresponding website can often simplify things. Creating a classroom account on Haiku Deck's Website and thus signing your devices in your classroom into the classroom account creates an easy workflow allowing for videos to sync directly to your gallery on the webiste. This makes retrieval of students presentations into one place easy.

Here is an embedded Haiku Deck that I created when we first discovered the app. I added a few more slides to show some of the added features with this week's update. From the website I have the options to download, embed, or share via email or social media giving me plenty of options to publish the work!